Recognise that text?

Google's rush to improve its Google Documents cloud-based service continues. New capabilities are being rolled out on almost a weekly basis. An interesting recent add-on is the ability to perform OCR (optical character recognition) on images of text, or text from PDF documents and save it through the docs interface. The quality of the OCR is not fabulous (which is odd, as OCR is a very mature technology and desktop applications offer a high level of accuracy and formatting fidelity). Now that the slumbering giant Microsoft is beginning to offer serious cloud-based word processor services, Google will need to make sure its product is high quality.
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Good Form from Google

googleformsAs part of their broad push for world domination, Google have invaded the land of online forms. The software maker Adobe offers a form solution -- constructed in Acrobat, emailed out, then the data gathered via an Adobe server. The Google alternative is much simpler. Users log in to Google Documents, select 'Create New Form', choose an appropriate template, then start creating the questions, multiple choices, lists, etc that make up your desired form. Forms also offers logic branching, where the form recipient can jump sections of the form -- eg. "if you have completed course A already, go to page 2". The finalised form can then be emailed directly to your target audience. They fill out the form and the resultant data is sent to a spreadsheet setup in Google Docs. All very simple and very effective. So if you need to gather information from clients, wish to use a form as a sales tool or want to poll your own staff, Google Forms is a compelling offering -- oh, and it is free.
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Commons Explorer

An Australian programmer has devised a neat little Java-based app for browsing commons-tagged images. Once installed, the application displays a list of public domain image libraries. Click on one of the libraries, and a cloud of tags appears, along with tiny image thumbnails gridded up below. Hover over one of the tags, and links to other tags are displayed, and images labelled with those tags light up in the grid. Click on one of the images, and a larger version appears, with the option of viewing it in Flickr. This is a really interesting app that graphically shows the power of image tagging and offers and excellent way of searching a collection. Hopefully the programmer will add more libraries and more images in each library.
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Update on DropBox functionality

After four months of using DropBox as our primary data storage channel, its viability is no longer in any doubt. 100Gb of storage space is beginning to seem a little restrictive, but with that caveat, the service works as advertised, and in an unobtrusive, reliable fashion. If Australian bandwidth was better, the whole concept would be pretty much perfect. We have DropBox linked to four desktop PCs in two locations. The need to keep track of file synchronisation and make multiple backups in both locations has vanished. At the end of each day, we save the working file folder to a backup USB powered hard drive. That, plus four identical copies of the data (one on each workstation) and the copy on the DropBox server (plus  DVD burn backups) makes the data seem quite secure. A skim of the DropBox forums hint at unmet demand for storage solutions larger than 100Gb, so hopefully additional packages will be rolled out soon.
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Image Searching in Safety

When a search engine enables users to search for images, and offers search parameters such as pixel size, aspect ratio, dominant colour and image content, they must know that many images are going to be used contrary to the laws of copyright. With the 'everything's free' ethos of web 2.0, such image use seems a victimless crime. Most users don't have the budget for expensive images from online image libraries. However, those who do suffer twinges can now choose from a new set of options relating to the kind of license attached to the image. Options range from "not filtered by license" through to "labelled for reuse (but not commercial use) to "labelled for commercial use with modification". Choosing the latter option dramatically reduces the number of hits for a given search, but at you are probably on the side of the angels (provided the web developer who set up the site in question is the legitimate owner of the image). As more people become aware of the range of image licensing options, hopefully more sites will be set up with this kind of image labelling, and the online image feast will get a little less risky. http://www.creativepro.com/article/safely-find-and-use-images-google
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New Google File Saving Functionality

Users of Google documents (or those seeking an alternative to Microsoft packages) will be interested to note the popular Google service now allows for any file type at all to be uploaded. This transforms Google docs into a de facto online hard drive.  Google Viewer will be able to open many, though not all of the common file types people might wish to upload. Users get 1Gb of space for free, then purchase additional memory at 25c per Gigabyte.  Google is working hard to encourage third party software developers to come up with services that add value to the basic Docs product.
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Preserving your online data

As people move more of their information onto the cloud and rely on servers in faraway lands, backups have become an issue. You may elect to occasionally download your online records to your own computer, but if you use a large number of cloud services, the process of backing them all up will soon become time consuming. As usual in such cases of Internet need, geeks have figured out a way to monetise this new service niche. Backupify (a rather unlovely business name) offers a one-stop backup service for all of your cloud services, including GMail, Twitter, Basecamp, Flickr and more. If you are comfortable with their pricing, then your only worry is handing all that potentially personal information on to a third party, whatever their strict privacy policies.
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Dynamic Live Brush

livebrushLiveBrush is one of the more fully featured programs available in the Adobe AIR format (see earlier post). While nowhere near as precise and powerful as programs such as Illustrator or CorelDRAW, it does have a few interesting aspects and the virtue of being free. Users select a brush from a fairly extensive list, and apply to a new page. The brush stroke is governed by the velocity and direction of the mouse, and the result is often very smooth, spontaneous and gestural -- far from the quavery line many of us manage when drawing freehand. The brushstroke has a mind of its own -- only notionally following the path you lay out for it. Each succeeding stroke has its own layer, and the artwork can be saved and exported at any time. Despite the many customisation options, Livebrush feels more like an interesting feature of a larger program than a standalone entity.  It's most obvious use is as a means of producing some loose, interesting brushwork and importing same into a drawing or layout package.
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Carbonite: Backup to the Cloud

Massive, extremely cheap online storage capacity and increased bandwidth are currently enabling a whole slew of new Internet businesses to carve out fresh niches. It's like the Cambrian evolutionary 'explosion', this time with silicon-germanium rather than carbon. On the subject of carbon, Carbonite is one of those interesting new cloud-based businesses. Users install a small program, indicate which folders they want backed up and then sit back while their data wafts into the ether, settling in the (apparently) secure servers of said company. The program only runs while your machine is idle and only updates changed files. If something at your end eventually goes wrong, the data retrieval process is very simple. Possible worries include the security of private data, and the rights of those from non-US jurisdictions if something did go awry. Users might also want to limit the amount they back up if their up/down data limits are fairly small. A graphic designer, for example, might balk at tagging folders with multi-hundred megabyte image files. Assuming Carbonite is stable and here for the long term, approximately AUD$65 per year for unlimited backup seems very reasonable.
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Viva Data Liberation!

dataliberationIf, like me, you spend a lot of time in the cloud, you may occasionally worry about your (over?) reliance on Google's many cloud products. You may have bookmarks set in Chrome, appointments recorded in Calendar, emails stored at Gmail, documents saved at Documents, blog posts at Blogger and so on. With the exception of fairly rare gmail outages, Google's service provision and data security performance has been pretty reasonable, But still, but still... A Google engineering team has set up a site called Data Liberation, aimed at providing users with clear and easy information on how to 'escape' from each of the Google services, taking their precious data with them. The stated (and admirable) principle behind this site is: "users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products". Google may be about to take over the world, but in this instance at least, they are doing so with a modicum of politeness.
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Adobe Air -- Rich Internet Applications

Adobe Systems is not quite in the same corporate league as Apple or Microsoft, but in terms of influence, it is a giant. The company has been instrumental in the development of page description language (Postscript) that dominates the printing and design industry, typeface formats (Type 1, and in conjunction with Microsoft, OpenType) used on tens of millions of computers, and the ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF) used to create platform independent documents. Hence, when Adobe strikes off in a new direction, many will take a keen interest. Adobe Air was launched in 2007, and is described as a "rich internet application".  While programs that use Adobe Air are installed to a user's computer and can run offline, they also add functionality via the Internet. For example, the Adobe Air-powered New York Times Reader allows users to download the entire paper, then access it even if offline. Adobe encourages software developers to write applications for the Air environment, and the Air Marketplace contains several hundred offerings. Productivity oriented examples include a job time log,  task managers, software shortcuts for all Adobe packages, Colour combination finder, and a surprisingly addictive graphics program specialising in dynamic brushstrokes. Adobe Air will have to build up a significant user and app base in order to survive. Web technologies need to have a critical mass behind them, or they tend to fade very quickly. Adobe claims 100 million downloads for Adobe Air apps, so perhaps the technology has a bright future.
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OCR, ASAP, OK?

Here's another neat little service on the cloud -- optical character recognition (OCR) for free. If you couldn't be bothered re-typing a two page printout with no electronic original, just scan the accursed thing and upload the file to OCR Terminal. The result can then be saved back to your PC in a number of formats. Their free basic account allows you up to 20 pages of OCR a month, which might be more than adequate for the occasional emergency.  Additional pages are charged on a per page basis, with the amount per page dropping with increased volume. After a certain point, however, one is entitled to wonder if a standalone OCR program would be cheaper. For any machine, anywhere convenience, however, this is a site worth bookmarking.
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Me and Mobile Me

Apple's response to the Cloud, Mobile Me allows users to maintain an online address book that synchonises with the address book on their Mac, and also on their iPhone, iTouch and any other mobile device. Changes to one version are 'pushed' to the linked instances elsewhere. The same applies to the Calendar application. Enter the details of your mail server, and Mobile Me also functions as a webmail portal. Users are also encouraged to upload images into an album application, and a user-nominated portion of the 20Gb standard allocation is available as an online hard disk. As per Apple's usual modus operandi, the interface is simple, clean and allows only limited customisation. After a couple of days use, my initial reactions are as follows: I love the address book feature, which works as advertised. The calendar feature is fine, but not as good as Google Calendar. More research is needed to see if it is possible to synch Google Calendar with MobileMe. The mail service is easy to set up, but has a huge flaw, for my setup at least. Each time it pings the mail server, MobileMe downloads everything on it, even if the same emails have already been downloaded. Ping several times, and you will get several copies of the same email. Given my office Mac will download the emails later, I don't want to set the server to delete an email if downloaded by MobileMe. Surely MobileMe should be able to recognise an email it has already downloaded. My web-based mail browser certainly has no such problem. The disk space supplied by Apple is useful, but in a world of cheap and sometimes free online storage, AUD$119 is not overwhelmingly great. In summary, the service is good, but not revolutionary. It didn't wow me the way DropBox or Google Earth did, but perhaps further enhancements are on the way, and MobileMe will go on to a more fully featured future. If not, my ardent hope is that Google somehow ties all of its online services together into a single integrated service -- the cloud on steroids.
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Vectors Online

aviaryOne of the interesting aspects of cloud computing are programs that run over the web rather than residing on your PC. Examples include Google Documents, Google Calendar, online accounting solutions and online databases. Other programs install on your computer, but run on a constant stream of data from the web, such as Google Earth, or are strongly integrated with the web, such as Picasa. Google Docs and Calendar have fairly limited capabilities compared to programs that reside on a single PC, mostly due to limitations of bandwidth. In the graphics field, the tentative beginnings of a revolution may be underway. A company named Aviary is offering a suite of programs available online, no installation required. The programs include both an image editor and a vector drawing editor. The drawing tools are frankly primitive compared to those available in Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The fundamental interface is very similar, and it could prove a useful introduction to people learning to use vector packages. As a pointer to the future, however, it is very interesting indeed. If a user could access a professional standard drawing package online, would it make sense any more to install it on your machine  (assuming reliable internet service provision)? Updates and improvements would be instantly available to the user, projects could be stored and distributed online, and collaboration and file sharing would be much easier. The same reasoning would apply to photo editing packages and even page layout programs. The financial model would be subscription or membership based, with some offerings perhaps free in return for advertising placement. Bandwidth would have to improve dramatically for this to become a reality. Barriers to entry for new software providers would be much lower. Personal computers would become windows to a much larger realm rather than kingdoms in their own right. Perhaps the only role for the home computer would be to mirror the data generated online in as a form of insurance. Perhaps each of the programs to which the user subscribes could have an offline version for moments where the web is unavailable, resynchronising when the connection is restored.
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Folders go global

dropboxThere are plenty of ways of storing files online and accessing them remotely. Some come via email services, or image sharing sites. Other users configure their own server, use space on their isp's server, or access their work server remotely. For sheer simplicity and ease of use, however, DropBox stands out.  After a very straightforward installation process (for Mac or PC) a DropBox folder appears in your drive tree (you get to choose where). The folder can be managed like any other folder on your computer: dragging files in, creating new folders, opening files and so on. The folder can be a little sluggish with larger files, which is not surprising -- it is online. The folder can be shared with others, or opened by yourself from any other location. No more mucking around with ftp or servers, or signing up with another service just to use their online storage. Storage up to 2Gb is free, with paid accounts kicking in after that.
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Colour Lovers

[caption id="attachment_308" align="alignleft" width="146" caption="ColourLovers"]ColourLovers [/caption] Individuals really matter on the Internet. They improve open source software, edit wikipedia, help SETI find extraterrestrial signals, produce podcasts, blog, twitter, aggregate news, break news, leak official documents and more.   Blogger Glenn Reynolds calls it the 'Army of Davids' effect. ColourLovers has generated its own passionate Army of Davids, all focussing on an area dear to many designers: colour. ColourLovers contributors add patterns and colour palettes to 'their' website in dizzying profusion. Their offerings are then rated by users and ranked according to those ratings. The site packs in a lot of visual information without losing clarity and offers a generous resource for anyone seeking colour ideas and interesting patterns/textures. The patterns are available at high resolution and the palettes can be exported to a number of image editing packages. With a constant stream of new colours and patterns, and a certain air of competition between contributors,  the site is always fresh and interesting. ColourLovers exemplifies the new generation of websites that are striving to meld the profit motive (the site takes advertising and sells merchandise) with a very open attitude towards anyone with relevant material to contribute.
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On the Same Page

Planning documents such as magazines, handbooks and newsletters can be daunting. Many editors use a form of flat plan to map out the document, showing how one page relates to another, allocating advertising space and the flow of articles.  Flat plans can be set out in programs such as Word, Excel and even InDesign. A new option has recently become available -- the online flat plan. Online flat plans enable a large number of people to access the same file whatever their location, and to quickly map the building blocks of a long document. These document planning solutions are a prime example of web 2.0 at its best -- innovative, customisable, updateable and easy to use. Intelligent Flat Plan charges on a per page basis, and the slightly less fully featured Blink Plan charges a monthly rate.
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PDFs for free: online & on your computer

Portable Document Format (PDF) files are a common feature of the modern Internet. Generated by Adobe's Acrobat software, PDF files carry with them all image and font information, and do not have to be reconstructed by the receiving computer. The format was devised by Adobe as a way of bringing the invariant nature of print on paper to the variable world of computer-based documents. By giving away the Acrobat Reader as a free download, Adobe ensured that the PDF format spread widely and has become an unofficial Internet and corporate standard. Graphic designers also use the format when finalising a job, embedding all image, typeface and colour information in a single PDF file and optimising it for printer workflows. However, creating a PDF is not free. At the time of writing, users can purchase the full family of Acrobat software for AUD$555. This allows them to create, edit, add comments to and authorise others to comment on, PDFs. Users of Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark Xpress and a host of other packages are able to either 'print' to PDF, or create a postscript file that can be then 'distilled'.   For businesses that only occasionally create or edit PDFs, the cost of this software is quite high. Adobe is aware of this part of the market, and offers an online PDF creator for approx USD$9.99 a month or USD$100 per year. However in the everything-should-be-free world of Web 2.0, numerous alternatives have arisen that cost absolutely nothing. DoPDF is a small download available on Windows. Once installed, a PDF option appears in the print options box of all the programs from which you might want to create PDFs. CutePDF is a stripped down piece of freeware which installs as a PDF option available when printing a document. PDF online allows users to upload a file, enter their email address and have the completed PDF file emailed back to them. Simple, and no software installation required. Primo Online does the same thing as PDF online, also for free. Open Office (the free open source suite of programs that emulate the Microsoft family), allow users to save files as PDFs as a native capability. There are other fee-based packages such as Nitro PDF that offer a rather more extensive set of features, and are still cheaper than the full version of Adobe Acrobat.
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Jumping the Google Shark

It's easy to get addicted to the Google cloud. First it was Google Documents, then Google Calendar, then the contacts feature in Gmail , and Google Desktop and Sidebar, Blogger and Picasa ... many of them viewed via the Google Chrome browser. Oh, and iGoogle, a way of creating a customisable home page.  Each of these services and others not mentioned here is frequently updated, richly featured and weirdest of all, free.  So what gives? As Robert Heinlein once observed, There Aint No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Reassuringly, this law still holds. Google uses these digital plums to generate customer loyalty,  drive traffic to its search engine and stimulate advertising revenue (99% of Google's revenue comes from advertising).  If you use a Google product every day, or a whole constellation of them, then it seems logical that you would also use their search engine. But as long as they are offering the services, why not take advantage? Keep in mind that what the Google giveth, the Google may taketh away. However, with such massive user bases building up for some of these services, the cost in customer outrage might be high enough to at least give Google pause if they are planning to withdraw one of their digital freebies. Here's a brief summary of some of the advantages of you Googelising your life (apologies to Derek Zoolander):
  • Access to contacts independent of location (assuming you have an Internet connection): Gmail
  • Access to word documents and spreadsheets independent of location: Documents
  • Ability to sychronise mail and contacts between cloud and PC/Mac: Gmail, via various software solutions
  • Access to a huge online email cache (that can also be converted by one utility into an online file storage facility): Gmail
  • Blindingly fast image catalogue that automatically tracks and adds images in selected folders: Picasa
  • Comprehensive database of everything on your computer, with search results delivered much faster than Windows: Desktop
  • A fast and stable browser that won't crash if one of the tabbed sessions fails: Chrome
On the debit side of the ledger, there are some disadvantages:
  • Potential loss of privacy. Google is going to end up knowing a lot about you, your habits and interests, and possibly your friends. They may do no evil, but their interests are not necessarily congruent with yours.
  • Over-reliance on a single provider
Google has competitors, but they don't have Google's depth and breadth. Google is able to swallow up smaller companies offering innovative online software solutions (YouTube, anyone?) and to encourage software developers to write programs that extend the functionality of Google freeware. The resulting situation has a momentum that does not yet seemed to have reached any inherent limits.
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